Horror – Joseph Carrabis, Author Blog

An Example of the Experiments – Fains I

Sometime in the mid- to late-1970s, my third time through college (and still having no luck with traditional education of the time), I sat in my study in a rented house on Willand Pond Road and flipped through my copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (the centenary edition revised by Ivor H. Evans). I wasn’t looking for anything in particular except to be distracted from exceedingly boring classwork.

I found it on pg 409: “Fains I.”

“Fains I” is “a schoolchildren’s term of unknown origin exempting the first to call: ‘Fains I goal-keeping.'”

Dig a little deeper and it’s used to offer protection for someone asserting an unprovable claim.

Dig lots deeper and there’s a reference to “Hercules’ Shirt,” meaning his wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion which was impervious to all but the most powerful weapons (can you say “arms race”?)

That prompted an ~2k word story which is now, thankfully, lost to antiquity.

BTW, that deepest reference is lost except in certain modern retellings of the Hercules legend (such as Dwayne Johnson’s Hercules) in which much of Hercules’ legend is called into question.

Yeah, okay, great.

What’s this got to do with the Experiments (in Writing)?

I mention in An Experiment in Writing – Part 7: Inciting Incidents that my current #work-in-progress is Fains I and that the opening sucks.

Well, of course it does.

And it’s fixable.

I’ve spent considerable neural horsepower over the past few weeks coming up with ways to a) make it better craft-wise and b) make it a better story, period (storytelling).

Some of the solutions point to the (currently 3,425 word) story becoming a novel.

I really don’t want to write another novel right now.

Okay, okay, okay.

What I can do is use Fain’s I as an example of some of the things I bring up in the Experiments in Writing.

Which we’ll begin now, with Fain’s I’s opening paragraph (anybody remember So I gave myself an exercise (eating my own dogfood)…? That’s what we’re going to do here for the next several weeks (or however long it takes for me to decide the story’s working and publishable).
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Jonah Jones’ “Some Are Wayfarers” in The Rabbit Hole VII: Not From Here

I asked fellow The Rabbit Hole VII: Not From Here anthology contributors to share some things about themselves prior to publication and those generous enough to do so will be appearing here for the next week or so.

Each entry gives a taste of their contribution, a little about them, how to contact them, how their story came about, and definitely a link to The Rabbit Hole VII: Not From Here (which you should purchase because it would make each and every one of us happy.
you do want to make us happy, don’t you?
i mean, considering what we wrote, you want us to know you’re a good person, right?).

And now, Jonah Jones’ Some Are Wayfarers:

Should you ever admit your own sadness, Bethan argued, it would either become more easily dismissed or drive you barmy. Not wishing to risk the latter, she had long since learned to push her own regrets into the background and therefore out of the realms of admission. Most of the time anyway. The love affair that hadn’t lasted had made her sad at the time. He had seemed so dependable; such a large part of a predictable future. They would walk together down the same road for as long as they lived. She had forgotten how plain she used to think she was, had even come to believe she was sexy. This new faith in herself had increased by the day until the day he left, mumbling excuses and platitudes whilst unable to look her in the eye. She remembered staring at the door for long after the sound of his footsteps had gone down the stairs and out into the street. Then all the old feelings of inadequacy had returned as if he’d poured a bucket of ice over her head. She was twice as ugly in a world full of beautiful women. She was a cockroach watching butterflies.

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A Twelfth of Carrabis (October 2024 Newsletter)

Fall continues its march into Winter and draws me to my studies with North American indigenes, to tales of WinterMan, SnowWalker, and the Northern Lights being the spirits of unborn children waiting to come to earth. We were lucky enough to get a good look at Comet A3. It’s next trip around the sun is in 80,000 years. I suspect many of us will be Joni Mitchell’s stardust when it returns.
Votes were cast and “A Twelfth of Carrabis” won for the newsletter title moving forward.
The Book of the Wounded Healers: A study in Perception Is currently scheduled for a late Oct-early Nov release. In 2024. Never hurts to be specific.

October-November 2024 Announcements
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My “The Tomb” in Midnight Garden

I asked fellow Midnight Garden anthology contributors to share some things about themselves prior to publication and those generous enough to do appeared in previous Midnight Garden posts for the past week or so.

Each entry gives a taste of their contribution, a little about them, how to contact them, how their story came about, and definitely a link to Midnight Garden (which you should purchase because it would make each and every one of us happy.
you do want to make us happy, don’t you?
i mean, considering what we wrote, you want us to know you’re a good person, right?).

Anywho, having run out of authors to post about, I now turn my posting eye on myself.

We’ll round out Midnight Garden posts with my five contributions to the anthology, this time…

The Tomb:

Bill Hall reached over to his bedstand and ran his fingers over several memory-sticks. His fingertips read each stick’s braille legend before selecting one and plugging it into his reader. A tapping at the side of his bed stopped him from adjusting his headphones. Bill smiled as he pulled them off. “Nurse Ramsey? I didn’t realize it was time to change the guard.”

How the story came about:
The Tomb was originally written in the late 1970s. and no one was interested in it. What you read is the last major edit, circa 2011. The original version – and much of what’s in the published version – came from a dream.
The story is personal to me as I was blind – technically “limited eyesight” and legally blind – until about four years ago. I was considered for some experimental surgeries back in the late 1970s and one thing or another dropped me from consideration. Finally, in 2020 – yep, the year of Covid – Technology caught up to what I needed it to be and several operations later, I can see.
In case you’re curious, going from an auditory landscape to a visual one is not easy. Susan (wife/partner/Princess) got a chuckle out of my staring at something while I matched what it looked like to the sound it made (and which I recognized).
The story itself deals with the fact that “seeing” means seeing everything, some of which isn’t pretty, and some, which others might consider ugly or horrid, is beautiful simply because it can be seen.
Continue reading “My “The Tomb” in Midnight Garden“